Compilation LP

Compilation LP is a remastered suite of the fiery Philly punk five-piece’s three EPs to date. The 40-minute record hurtles ahead, a swarm of righteous energy with hooks in every corner.

Sheer Mag’s signature tune is “Fan the Flames,” an anarchic jamboree with mandatory party hats. Guitar licks flirt, rhythms tease, and, amidst the stirrings of Tina Halladay’s furious yowl, champagne flutes tremble on their shelves. Only then does the song show its hand: a roaring screed on housing inequality and unjust rent inflation, with a cast of gentrifying yuppies, heartless investors, and a landlord negligent of human rights and fire-hazards. It concludes in a furnace of horror: “When our neighbors burned/The realtors shook hands/With their backs turned.” As Halladay fumes, acrobatic riffs twirl optimistically. A final chorus rallies troops: “You’ve got to stand up and break the chains/Make a plan and demand what the damage pays.”

On Compilation LP, a remastered suite of their three EPs to date, the Philly gang apply their fury to a thematic swath: by turns personal and political, romantic and righteous. Like any throwback band setting the world to rights with whiskey on its breath, the band requires a magnetic personality for anchorage, of which it has five. Halladay, while rooted in punk, is a born rock star with a soul singer’s defiance: In a soaring note, her wail can crest, tremble suggestively, and suddenly snap, as if to say, “Boy, you couldn’t handle the rest.” Less merciful is lead guitarist Kyle Seely, a prolific and preternatural hook-writer: “Point Breeze” opens with a wild, red-herring riff that quickly flips inside-out; you want to rewind it, like a magic trick, and locate the sleight of hand. Seely composes the songs with his key-jumping bassist and brother, Hart; drummer Ian Dykstra lays hot coals under their feet, his jittery beats primed for a structural collapse. Matt Palmer, the agile rhythm guitarist, often doubles as the band’s firebrand lyricist.

As befits a band that rallies its disenchanted listeners to organize, the result is an all-pistons-firing unit: The 40-minute record hurtles ahead, a swarm of righteous energy; there are abundant pre-choruses, mid-song transitions plugged with errant licks, a hook for every available nook. The awesome catchiness of opener “What You Want,” from their 2015 debut EP, hinges on a cheeky three-note bassline that bobbles innocently, as if lost between verses. Halladay sings of romantic submission—“I can be anything that you want me to be/Lock me up, yeah, you got the key”—but you’d need a Geiger Counter to detect vulnerability in her whiplash vocals. Even when the lyrics turn inward, Halladay’s throaty exhortations advance a subtext of personal liberation.

Hard rock’s value as an emancipatory symbol has, of course, diminished since its 1970s heyday. But Sheer Mag’s audacity, in reclaiming an era of working-class music that nobody takes seriously anymore, is central to their appeal. Plenty of throwback rock groups, taking after Weezer, would sooner invert cock-rock chauvinism with self-deprecation or slacker charm. But throughout Compilation LP, Sheer Mag play by the riff-rock rules—power chords empower, solos blaze, and choruses rally. They identify in Thin Lizzy’s swagger an underdog spirit that can be repurposed without irony. Matched to the group’s us-vs.-them narratives, hard-rock brawn becomes a crudely effective vehicle for political urgency.

More than most groups who sing of “fightin’ tooth and nail just to take what’s mine,” Sheer Mag are attuned to the forces underpinning their characters’ malaise. On “Hard Lovin’,” they conjure links between class oppression and domestic violence; “Can’t Stop Fighting” confronts the horror of Ciudad Juarez, the Mexican city where countless women’s murders have gone unpunished. On the latter, helpless to redeem a faraway injustice, the narrator’s viewpoint pivots to confront the broad spectre of misogynistic violence. Having asserted that “We’re striking back, baby,” Halladay glares at the camera: “You say you don’t understand?/I can see the blood/It’s on your hands.” It’s the album’s most direct, and darkest, line—piercing, outraged, with matter-of-fact finality. But Halladay exudes triumph, because her rage has found its object; she signs off with a yowled “Oh yeah!,” the glorious sound of renounced apathy.